Tag Archives: RONA

True But Useless: Why So Much Management Advice Sucks (and what to do about it).

Why does so much management advice sound reasonable but turn out to be of little value? Most readers will know what I mean. Take the following guidance on how companies can ‘accelerate their agile transformation’: Create a C-suite with an … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged abstraction, Alfred North Whitehead, altruism, Aristotle, BSC, budgets, cause-and-effect, complex adaptive systems, Daniel Boorstin, experience, gardeners, gemba, growing people, KPI, Lao-Tzu, management, Mary Parker Follett, MBO, means and ends, measurement, mindset, RONA, selfishness, Stanley McChrystal, Tao Te Ching, truisms | Comments Off on True But Useless: Why So Much Management Advice Sucks (and what to do about it).

BOOM! – The Perils of Big-Bang Rollouts

Late last year Target, the Minneapolis-based American discount retail chain, suffered a massive data security breach. Just before the busy Christmas season hackers broke into the corporation’s computer systems and stole information from over 100 million of its credit and … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged big bang, change, ecological perspective, hacking, HMO, Hudson's Bay, Learning from the Links, Lowe's, Obamacare, Oxford Health Plans, positive deviance, RONA, security breach, Stephen Wiggins, systems, Target, W.T. Grant, Zellers | 1 Comment

The Counsel of Desirable Outcomes: Actions versus Achievements

The bane of most, perhaps all, how-to books in management and business is what I call the “Counsel of Desirable Outcomes” – advice that sounds like action but really consists of achievements. Take a recent article in the Financial Times … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General | Tagged achievement verbs, action verbs, ecological perspective, Gilbert Ryle, inputs, outputs, productivity growth, PwC, RONA | 1 Comment

Clayton Christensen at Davos: An Ecological Perspective on Innovation

When interviewed at the 2013 World Economic Forum in Davos, Clayton Christensen discussed what he has called “The Capitalist Dilemma”. It goes like this: There are basically three kinds of innovation in the economy: empowering, sustaining and efficiency. Empowering (or … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Uncategorized | Tagged Anglo-Saxon capitalism, capital, capitalist dilemma, Carlota Perez, change, Clayton Christensen, community, complex systems, context, Davos, ecocycle, ecological perspective, ecology, ecosystem, efficiency, empowering, innovation, interest rates, IRR, machine metaphor, organic metaphor, ROCE, RONA, social traps, sustainability, sustaining, sweet zone, The New Ecology of Leadership, Tyler Cowen, unemployment | 3 Comments